Olympics: USA-1 makes bobsled history

Sunday

Feb 28, 2010 at 2:00 AM

WHISTLER, British Columbia — With one more perfect run down sliding's most intense track, Steven Holcomb drove USA-1 to the Olympic gold medal in four-man bobsledding on Saturday, ending a 62-year drought for the Americans in the event.

The Associated Press

WHISTLER, British Columbia — With one more perfect run down sliding's most intense track, Steven Holcomb drove USA-1 to the Olympic gold medal in four-man bobsledding on Saturday, ending a 62-year drought for the Americans in the event.

It was the first gold medal for the US in sliding's signature race since 1948.

Holcomb's four-run time was 3 minutes, 24.46 seconds, with Justin Olsen, Steve Mesler and Curt Tomasevicz pushing for him again — just as they did in winning the world championship a year ago.

"This is bigger," US coach Brian Shimer said.

German Andre Lange, who failed to win a gold medal for the first time in five Olympic events, had a nearly perfect final run to win the silver in his final race. Lange finished 0.38 seconds behind Holcomb and his team.

Holcomb and his sledmates crossed the finish line one more time and threw their arms in the air before wrapping each other in American flags. Holcomb hoisted his helmet high as family and friends craned for photographs, and a party that the US program had been waiting 62 years for was finally getting started.

"It's huge," said USA-3 driver Mike Kohn, who finished 13th. "This is a great moment. It's hopefully going to change the program and bring some publicity and some funding to this sport, just like it did in '02 when we won silver and bronze."

Kohn was a push athlete for Shimer's sled at those 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, when Todd Hays drove to silver and Shimer got the Americans a bronze. The US had never been closer to being kings of the bobsled mountain — until now.

"It means an awful lot," said Darrin Steele, the CEO of the US Bobsled and Skeleton Federation. "This has been a long road. But all the components came together. You put a sled and a team together, and you never know how it's going to go."

A slew of US teammates rushed to Holcomb's sled, and one of the first men to offer congratulations was Geoff Bodine, the 1986 Daytona 500 champion who was the driving force behind the Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project — which funded and built the sleds Americans raced here.

Holcomb had a lead of 0.40 seconds over Rush after Friday's first two runs, a giant advantage in sliding.

"It was actually torture to have to wait for a whole night for this," Steele said.

Holcomb was walking around trackside about an hour before the final heat, shaking his finger, mouthing the words "One more." With a lead of 0.45 seconds over Rush, all Holcomb needed to do was get his sled down the mountain without a huge mishap, knowing his lead was such that no one could catch him.

All he had to do was not wreck before Curve 13, this diabolical track's most diabolical turn, the one Holcomb himself dubbed "50-50" after seeing about one out of every two sleds that tried to navigate it crash there last year.

Holcomb and his sledmates grabbed each other by the hands one last time, took one last look down the hill and prepared to push the "Night Train" — that menacing, flat-black, super-high-tech sled that is coveted by almost every bobsledder in the world — into Olympic immortality.